APPLICATIONS

BALTIMORE -- SC2002, the most successful show in the 15-year history of the annual high performance computing and networking conference, concluded today with awards recognizing the most outstanding achievements and contributions in the field. The record-breaking conference attracted an estimated 7,200 participants to the technical program sessions and the exhibit floor, nearly 2,000 more than last year. The conference also featured a record 223 exhibitors with displays covering nearly two acres. Honors presented at SC2002 included the prestigious Gordon Bell Awards and special recognition for the best technical paper, the best student technical paper, and the best research poster. SC2002 heralded the arrival of the Earth Simulator in the Gordon Bell competition, with three of the awards being given for applications run on the new system. The Gordon Bell Awards, chosen by a five-person panel from over 30 entries, are traditionally granted in three categories: special accomplishment based on innovation; peak performance based on operations per second; and a price per performance ratio measured in megaflops per dollar. Winners depend on the entries received; in some years a prize is not awarded in a given category. Awards presented this year were: * The Gordon Bell Award for Peak Performance: A 26.58 Tflops Global Atmospheric Simulation with the Spectral Transform Method on the Earth Simulator Authors: Satoru Shingu, Yoshinori Tsuda, Wataru Ohfuchi, Kiyoshi Otsuka, Earth Simulator Center, Japan Marine Science and Technology Center; Hiroshi Takahara, Takashi Hagiwara, Shin-ichi Habata, NEC Corporation; Hiromitsu Fuchigami, Masayuki Yamada, Yuji Sasaki, Kazuo Kobayashi, NEC Informatec Systems; Mitsuo Yokokawa, National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology; Hiroyuki Itoh, National Space Development Agency of Japan. In a breakthrough predictive of the Earth Simulator's effect on climate research, scientists ran an extremely efficient 26.58 Tflops simulation of a complex climate system using an atmospheric circulation model called AFES. * The Gordon Bell Award for Language (special category): 14.9 Tflops Three-dimensional Fluid Simulation for Fusion Science with HPF on the Earth Simulator Authors: Hitoshi Sakagami, Himeji Institute of Technology; Hitoshi Murai, Earth Simulator Center, Japan Marine Science and Technology Center; Yoshiki Seo, NEC Corporation; Mitsuo Yokokawa, Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute. Researchers successfully completed a 14.9 Tflops run of a parallelized version of IMPACT-3D, an application written in High Performance Fortran that simulates the instability in an imploding system, such as the ignition of a nuclear device. Three additional papers earned Gordon Bell Awards for special accomplishment: * 16.4-Tflops Direct Numerical Simulation of Turbulence by a Fourier Spectral Method on the Earth Simulator Authors: Mitsuo Yokokawa, Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute; Ken'ichi Itakura, Atsuya Uno, Earth Simulator Center, Japan Marine Science and Technology Center; Takashi Ishihara, Yukio Kaneda, Nagoya University. New methods for handling the extremely data-intensive calculation of a three-dimensional Fast Fourier Transform on the Earth Simulator have allowed researchers to overcome a major hurdle for high performance simulations of turbulence. * Salinas: A Scalable Software for High Performance Structural and Solid Mechanics Simulation Authors: Manoj Bhardwaj, Kendall Pierson, Garth Reese, Tim Walsh, David Day, Ken Alvin, James Peery, Sandia National Laboratories; Charbel Farhat, Michel Lesoinne, University of Colorado at Boulder. The structural mechanics community has embraced Salinas, engineering software over 100,000 lines long that has run on a number of advanced systems, including a sustained 1.16 Tflops performance on 3,375 ASCI White processors. * NAMD: Biomolecular Simulation on Thousands of Processors Authors: James C. Phillips, Gengbin Zheng, Sameer Kumar, Laxmikant V. Kale, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Researchers achieved unprecedented scaling of NAMD, a code that renders an atom-by-atom blueprint of large biomolecules and biomolecular systems. In addition to the Gordon Bell Awards, the SC2002 Conference selects several outstanding award winners for research papers presented during the meeting. * The SC2002 Best Technical Paper: Parallel Multistage Gauss-Newton-Kyle Methods For Inverse Wave Propagation Authors: Vulcan Acetic and Omar Ghettos, Carnegie Mellon University; George Biros, Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University. The researchers presented a parallel algorithm for inverse problems governed by time-dependent Pies, and scalability results for an inverse wave propagation problem of determining the material field of an acoustic medium. Using the algorithm, they solved a synthetic inverse wave propagation problem though a pelvic bone geometry involving 2.1 million inversion parameters in 3 hours on 256 processors. * The SC2002 Best Student Technical Paper: Active Proxy-G: Optimizing the Query Execution Process in the Grid Authors: Joel Salts and Thin Kurd, Ohio State University; Alan Busman and Enrique Andrade, University of Maryland. The Grid environment facilitates collaborative work by allowing many users to query and process geographically dispersed data. Active Proxy-G is a service that is able to cache query results, to use those results for answering new incoming queries, to generate sub queries for the parts of a query that cannot be produced from the cache, and to submit the sub queries for final processing at application servers that store the raw datasets. * Best Research Poster: Faucets: Efficient Resource Allocation on the Computational Grid. Authors: Main Posture, Sameer Kumar, Jayant DeSourza, Sindhura Bandhakavi, and Laxmikant Kale, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. As the amount of parallel application runs have increased, so has the need to efficiently share resources across a distributed system. Faucets, which aims at supporting the metaphor of computing power as a utility, approaches the problem by treating the compute power as a commodity and by unleashing a market economy for the producers and consumers of the computational resources. Next year's conference, SC2003, with the theme of "Igniting Innovation," will be held at the Phoenix Civic Plaza Convention Center in Phoenix, AZ, from November 15 - 21, 2003. The latest information can be found at http://www.sc-conference.org/sc2003.